Benz World Blog » Belton

Belton Folly

Jason Benz — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 01:41:48 +0000

This is the Belton Folly near Grantham in the UK. I wanted to get a bit more colour and detail in the sky. This is a situation where a graduated filter would help. Graduated filters are bits of glass you fit in front of the lens to help the camera get a good exposure. When shooting landscapes the sky is almost always far brighter than the land. Although our eyes are very good at seeing the detail in the sky and land at the same time a cameras sensor will often overexpose the sky or underexpose the land. A grad filter is clear at the bottom and slowly gets darker towards the top of the picture. Unfortunately Cokin who make the filters seem to have gone bankrupt but I hear they have recently been bought out. Anyway I could not find any camera shops with any Grad ND filter kits to fit my new lens. Fortunately there was enough detail in the sky for Photoshop to apply a filter after taking the shot. Although Photoshop does give you far more control in applying filters in post processing I still think there is a place for old school filters. Using HDR is another way of solving this problem but the results often look less natural.

Belton Globes

Jason Benz — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:47:48 +0000

These terrestrial and celestial globes where on display in Belton House. If anyone knows if this style of globe have some special name please leave a comment. Although photography was allowed in Belton House the light was very dim and flash was not allowed. In situations such as this a high ISO value is needed. ISO is the sensitivity of the film or sensor. The trade off is an increase in noise. My old camera had an ISO range from 100-800 but if I wanted to submit something for Stock Photography I could only use the low noise shots taken at ISO 100. This was taken with a Canon 5D mark II at ISO 3200 and had a remarkable lack on noise. I don’t know good enough for stock but its still very impressive.

Belton Park

Jason Benz — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 11:11:56 +0000

This is Belton Park in Lincolnshire, UK. It was the first chance to test out my new Canon 5D mark II. It’s nice to be using a camera without a schizophrenic auto focus for a change. The Mark II has been out for three years now and many believe a mark III will be announced soon. The good news is Canon have dropped the price of the Mark II recently which means you can get a lot of camera for your money.

To process this image I used the HSL/Grayscale tab in Camera RAW. This lets you change the saturation of individual colours. For this image the purple of the background flowers could be increased without over saturating the yellows in the grass.